Dan Graham, Mark Leckey e Jeremy Deller. Pratiche artistiche di riappropriazione tra punk, EDM e postmodernità

The use and the recycling of archival materials are crucial for writing the hi-stories of music scenes and subcultures, which have generally been oral and conveyed by DIY visual media documenting their activities. Contemporary artists use this type of archives to explore how found footage strategies and forms can define wider social and cultural discourses. The paper deals with three video and digital works centered on punk/post-punk and EDM scenes and subcultures that are compared with a specific audiovisual form: "Rock My Religion" (Dan Graham, 1983-84) with the video-essay; "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" (Mark Leckey, 1999) with the videoclip; "Everybody In The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992" (Jeremy Deller, 2018) with the documentary. Punk/post-punk and EDM’s representations reveal deep meanings on society concerning such themes as the collective rituality, the significance of the bodies, the relations with religion and other political, social, and cultural instances. The three works are analyzed following the three methodologies on the use of found footage outlined by William Wees (1993): compilation, collage, and appropriation. Then, the outcomes of such analyses are discussed with reference to Fredric Jameson’s framework on Postmodern culture and the idea of «the loss of historicity» (1981, 1983, 1984-1991, 2005).